Chapter 6
Grant Autonomy
Most people don’t like someone always looking over their shoulder or second-guessing them. While it’s good to help our teams build their confidence and meet challenges, it’s also important to let them loose to explore and try their ideas on their own. When we feel like we own much of what we do, we tend to take responsibility and really love our work. And when we love our work, we learn faster.
Real learning rarely comes from success. It’s the failures that really force us to ponder the details of what we do, to understand the things and processes we work with. Failure can also spur us to try and try again to actualize our ideas. The same is true when, as teammates or bosses, we allow others to fail. If we believe in our team and help them believe in themselves, we should also be confident that they will learn from their experimentation and go on to successes that may be even greater than we hoped for.
We also shouldn’t let bosses ruin our initiative. Among the issues of autonomy we explore in this chapter is how to keep that from happening. Another is what we do when we fail, or when our work situation is intolerable. When should we quit, if ever?
Learning Faster When We Love It
Practice doesn’t make perfect. There is no perfect. Great practice will hone good habits and get rid of bad habits. Poor practice is when we practice our mistakes over and over until they’re ingrained. By now, most of us have read, or heard of, the ten- thousand- hour rule, in which ten thousand hours is the magic practice barrier after which we get to be experts and gurus. Unfortunately, that has been a misrepresentation of the work of K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues from Florida State University from the 1990s.1 Ericsson never claimed ten thousand hours constituted the magic expert barrier.
However, research does support the idea of reinforcing “time on task.” In sports, most today believe the best coaching and training involve increasing the number of “touches on the ball” instead of an older style of coaching in which players stand around watching a demonstration and then take turns doing one activity. Kids standing in lines indicates a poor practice; a good practice has everyone involved.
We learn by watching, but we learn faster by doing.
In 2014, a team of researchers examined eighty-eight different studies on the effects of practice over time and concluded that practice does count, but much less than previously argued.2 Practice certainly matters, they found, but other factors were equally important, such as the participants’ age when the activity was introduced and how much they enjoyed the activity. In one example, children displayed thirty times higher reading comprehension when they reported enjoying the reading.
That may come as no surprise, but we should keep that in mind when making project and task assignments in our professional work. Task invitations that are a stretch but that people might enjoy are invitations for excellence. But we are far more likely to get mediocre results when we offer project and task invitations for activities people detest. And research seems to suggest that no amount of arguing for pluck, grit, and perseverance will improve results when the task presented is against the skill set of those assigned it.
I discussed this issue of granting autonomy with Scott Turicchi, CFO of J2, a $500 million technology company, in November 2015. He told me he very intentionally moves team members to different positions within his organization so they have the benefit of seeing different sides of projects and understand the greater picture of any particular project or deal in the works.
As Turicchi described, there’s an even more important reason, greater than job experience and perspective, for working in different roles: finding the intersection of what we are good at and what we love to do. Turicchi said that the kinds of people he likes to hire are those who have passion for their work.
Once we’ve created a safe environment for people to explore their capabilities, we also need to let them fail on their own sometimes without our constant intervention, as we see in the next story.
Letting Others Fail on Their Own
Things were getting out of hand. It was time for an intervention. It was the end of 2014, and only a year earlier my wife and I had a thirty- minute “screen time” media option for our three kids. After homework, after chores, after mealtime together, and after checking in and sharing their daily activities with us, our kids could zone out on Netflix, Instagram, TV, or whatever they wanted for thirty minutes. In fact, this turned out to be a rather enjoyable time for us as well. While kids blanked out on devices, we could chat in the kitchen as we cleaned it up after dinner.
A year later the thirty-minute option had devolved into our kids leaping into one-, then two-hour headphone-wearing journeys silently watching Parks and Recreation or lost in Taylor Swift albums or bingeing on FIFA Soccer on Xbox—each drifting quietly to separate corners of the house.
I’m all for music and movies, and sometimes throw dance parties with the kids in the living room or have sessions of watching Forrest Gump, laughing together with the kids. But this had gotten out of hand. The rules had lost meaningful consequences, and often my wife and I were too exhausted to marshal the strength to stop it. It was time to break the habit.
Our experiment hasn’t been consistently effective, but instead of demanding they adhere to the thirty- minute option or confiscating their devices, we’ve made progress when we’ve tried other approaches. We started initiating play with our kids, such as skiing over a ski jump we built, or playing soccer in the backyard. Or we assign the kids small jobs, such as setting the table or preparing parts of dinner. Or we simply explain that staring at a screen near bedtime makes it hard to go to sleep. When all else fails, I quietly go into the basement and unplug the Wi-Fi router.
That decision—to unplug the Wi-Fi—made the choice for them. In that moment, as a parent, I decided what was best for them. But as we learned earlier from the Brigham Young study, when we give our kids greater autonomy, responsibility, trust, and unconditional support, they tend to make more conscientious decisions.
Believe me, this certainly doesn’t always work. In our experience, a fourteen-year-old does not always make thoughtful and conscientious decisions when granted autonomy. That’s the understatement of the week, but it should be the eventual goal, because, in a few short years, he will be making many of these decisions without us around.
The same philosophy we used in granting autonomy to our kids extends to the workplace. Too often, hiring managers and recruiters brag about only hiring the best and the brightest from the top schools, but then won’t give them the latitude to make even the most mundane decisions on their own.
In a November 23, 2015, interview, Bashar Nejdawi, executive VP of Ingram Micro, told me that sometimes he knows a project or initiative of a junior team will fail.3 He has the experience and the insight to recognize that it’s likely to bomb, but he lets it unfold anyway. He believes that, as long as it’s not a mission-critical failure, it’s more important to let people go through that learning experience themselves. They need to have the experience of understanding firsthand that a particular process or initiative won’t work.
This boss understands that at some point we have to let go of those we manage, that the benefits of granting autonomy can yield big results in terms of company success. But what if the boss is more of a “bosshole,” creating a toxic work environment where autonomy is in short supply?
Dealing with a Difficult Boss
Every evening, all around the world, many of us come home from work, greet our partners and our kids, and have discussions. Discussions in the kitchen, at the dinner table, and before we go to bed.
Sometimes the topic is school grades, or upcoming trips, or what to bring to the Lowensteins’ barbecue. But often the subject of these discussions is the company we work for, our colleagues, and our bosses. It’s long been known and understood that the quality of our work culture and of our relationship with our bosses can affect our mood, our sense of optimism or despair at work, and even our health.
Toxic work environments, and in particular cruel bosses, have been linked to hypertension, elevated blood pressure, and even heart attacks. One woman I worked with in recent years had kidney stones clinically attributed to the stress of her work environment.
Toxic bosses are also responsible for the disposition of entire teams when they single out individuals for criticism. When a boss pulls a person aside quietly and privately to deliver critical or disparaging feedback, that individual absorbs the critical evaluation and then infects the rest of the team. According to recent studies replicated with teams in China and the United States, each individual criticized subsequently becomes toxic and divisive to other team members.4 It’s true that negative attitudes are contagious.5
Seven in ten Americans say bosses and toddlers with too much power act similarly, according to one study.6 In the study, 345 white-collar office workers described the most abusive and disruptive bosses in their lives as self-oriented, stubborn, overly demanding, interruptive, impulsive, and prone to throwing tantrums.
In such cases, mental jujitsu—the use of the strength or weakness of an adversary to disable him—could come in handy:
• Give him credit. If a boss needs to be “right” all the time, we should let him. I don’t mean letting him sabotage a project by pushing it in a ridiculous direction, but rather practicing deep listening. We listen carefully to the boss’s ideas, and reiterate them back carefully to clarify what we heard. In the retelling, our boss may, or may not, understand the fallacy of his reasoning. But, either way, he was heard and acknowledged.
• Bring her down to earth. If a boss paints grand visionary ideas without understanding the detail and the effort involved, we ask her to get granular, into the details. Help her understand how her great, sweeping vision plays out at the execution level of technology, marketing, and product redesign. Ask her who, specifically, she envisions doing this work? What resources might need to be made available to cover contingencies, or to hire outside help? When you help the boss understand the real effort involved, she will likely either abandon her idea or roll up her sleeves and help— probably the former.
• Support him. Too often, a person gets promoted to his level of incompetence. He is in over his head and resorts to low-level management tactics, such as examining the smallest detail or scheduling meaningless meetings with no agenda. He is in the weeds. We should help him. I know it hurts to think about it, but if we help guide the boss’s efforts and his communication, and help refocus his time and energy, he will become an ally, and likely support our initiatives the next time we suggest something.
Learning When to Quit
Your son doesn’t like seventh- grade band? Let him quit. Training for that marathon is too hard? Just quit. Feeling frustrated or detached from your work? Quit. It’s easy. Tired of not making progress on your writing project? Drop it, lose it, let it go. Yeah! That felt good.
When it comes to jobs, there can be plenty of valid reasons to quit, including toxic cultures and lack of professional growth.
But remember: when we quit something, we have to live with quitting, so we should have a pretty good reason. While quitting might feel thrilling and easy, it’s hard to go back—not impossible, but pretty hard. I once heard a story about a rich guy who kept giving so much money to his alma mater that the school named the football stadium after him. Why did he keep giving so much money? When he was a junior at the university, he quit the football team because practice was too hard. He has regretted it for more than thirty years, and he literally kept paying for that missed opportunity.
It’s also important to distinguish the difference between quitting and taking a break. Since 2000, I have started a marathon- training plan almost every year. I’ve only made it to the starting line twice over the past fourteen years, but I always start the plan. Last year my wife and I got up to eighteen miles and stopped. With the kids’ schedules, it was too time-consuming. I had to adjust to changing circumstances.
Or, to take a work example, some of the happiest and most successful people I know have a life strategy in which they intentionally change careers and take sabbaticals in the middle of their jobs. This is not impossible to do—it just takes thoughtful planning.
While I don’t think lack of commitment to hard work is a legitimate reason to quit something, there are legitimate reasons, including the following:
• It’s impairing health. Stress-inducing environments, including work, school, or sports, are intolerable. According to the American Institute of Stress, which lists fifty signs and symptoms of stress- related illness, “numerous emotional and physical disorders” have been linked to stress, including “depression, anxiety, heart attacks, stroke, hypertension, immune system disturbances that increase susceptibility to infections, a host of viral linked disorders ranging from the common cold and herpes to AIDS and certain cancers, and autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis.”7 And that’s just part of the list.
We can try to turn around this toxic environment and be the change we wish to see in the world, but if the toxicity is overwhelming, quitting may be the only reasonable option. Otherwise, we could bring that stress home and infect our family and friends. Our health, and the health of the people we love, is more important than our job.
• It’s a professional dead end. Unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly common to pigeonhole workers into particular jobs, roles, and responsibilities. Gone are the days, it seems, when someone could work her way up through the mailroom and get job experience throughout the organization—the kind of professional experience that leads to personal and professional growth. The companies with the highest retention and the highest levels of innovation offer their employees the chance to work in a variety of positions in the company. Or, as they say on the soccer field, when we play different positions, we “see all sides of the ball.”
• It’s devoid of challenge. “Quit and stay” is one of the saddest descriptions of employees that I’ve heard recently. It’s applied to people who have emotionally and psychologically checked out yet remain in their jobs, punching a clock—either for the money or the simple inability to conceive of doing anything else.
While quitting may be the only viable option to working in a toxic environment, we should think long and hard before we take that action. We should make sure that it’s not just because we find the work challenging, perhaps “too hard.” Sometimes it takes that extra pound of grit to get through difficult challenges, but that place where we feel challenged—that spot right on the edge of our capabilities where we have to step up our game—is the place where we are at our most creative and productive. When we feel right on the edge of what we are capable of, that’s where we’ll learn the most.